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Jim Jarmusch: The Limits of Control. 2009.
Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control is structured around two conceits optimized to give him space to fill with stuff he likes - paintings, beautiful women, well-dressed men, cigarettes and coffee - and in which to air his meditations on film and - yes - the meaning of existence, among other things: 1) the repetition of motifs such as his lone man’s “two esspressos in separate cups,” and 2) the Point Blank / Le Samourai undistractible-agent-on-an-unintelligible-mission-slash-existential-quest story. With the second, any diversion can be assimilated and the more out of the way, the more ambiguous the connection to the mystery - the mystery of what the lone man is involved in (does he know? will we ever find out? did he learn something by going to the art gallery?), the more absorbing it tends to be, and the more liberating it is for the filmmaker.
Beyond having expressly mentioned Point Blank in interviews and naming his production company after it, the references to the earlier film in The Limits of Control are many. The final encounter between Isaach De Bankolé and Bill Murray is a shorter and much less compelling reversal of the one between Lee Marvin and Carroll O’Connor in Point Blank. It serves to reveal the shortcomings of the former film, though Jarmusch’s aims seem completely different and his film, in a way, is more into smoking (something) than competing, anyway. His film is a scrapbook, loose and accomodating, and for the most part convivial despite its coolness; Point Blank is a cold, polished stone.
That balance of coolness and warmth, seriousness and lightness, is a little awkward, and often the dialogue, casually philosophical, and the somewhat trite, photogenic quirkiness of everything, comes close to grating. But the film isn’t boring and there is one scene on a train, its images surreally bright and crisp, windmills on what could be a lunar landscape out the window, that does something special; the train might as well be drifting through space.
Albrecht Dürer: Great Piece of Turf.
Pedro Almodovar: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. 1988.
At the top of my list of film discoveries this year is Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. After watching it I can understand why some critics are disappointed with Broken Embraces, Almodovar’s latest, in comparison to his earlier, maybe less self-conscious films. There is so much trashy spontaneity in Women, and gawdy colors, foot-level camera angles, soundstage sunsets, soapy comedy (the lighter side of the same things that influenced Fassbinder perhaps), yet the design elements never overpower the characters.
Led by Carmen Maura, an Almodovar regular, the actors are given plenty of breathing room and an interested - not to say fawning - camera. There is little that is really painful in the film. It feels like the director can barely stand to cause these women sorrow, and whatever sadness there is is mainly of a half-campy kind that only advantages their charm and beauty in his eyes. It is movie hardship that they go through, never without its attendant glamour. On the other hand, there is a real heart here, too. You sense that, like the taxi driver always improbably there for Pepa (Maura), tears streaming down his face at the sight of hers, the plights of film heroines affect Almodovar deeply, that while their difficulties bring out an aestheticized allure in them, that women on film are quite as real to him as flesh and blood.
Among the many moments that snap with magic, one in particular near the end stood out for me. An older woman (Julieta Serrano), the film’s antagonist, if there is one, has hopped onto the back of a motorcycle to race to the airport. Almodovar shows her head in profile, minus her dowdy glasses, hair blowing in the wind instead of unattractively permed, in what strikes me as an allusion to the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. Only, the camera stays on her long enough to let us see something resilient and still very beautiful in that aging, windblown face, long enough for us to glimpse what she might have looked like at Pepa’s age - a beautiful woman herself, not the frumpy, hormonal one forced into the role of the jealous old witch. It’s a stunningly compassionate moment tucked in unexpectedly amidst the action of a chase scene and the general lightness of the film’s comic mode. Could Almodovar have planned this revelation, or was he just ready and watching that closely?
It’s a good example of another thing, besides the acting, that makes the film exciting - the hypersensitivity to everything it comes in contact with, animate or not, and the fleetness that allows it to follow sensation where it leads. The sensuousness of ripe tomatoes being cut (referred back to in Broken Embraces), the shiny wood of the hotel banister - few films are as alertly, promiscuously distractible and I can’t imagine many directors being able to indulge that impulse and still come out with a film that feels controlled and, in its way, tight. But the film sticks together, partly, I think, because the focus on characters is not lost, but also because, as David Thomson says in his review of it, “film is friendly to anyone who will try anything.” Thoroughgoing gusto makes its own coherence.
A macaque in Nagano - they’re as plentiful there as squirrels in Canada.
Hot Titles (7): Greenaway: A Walk Through H
John Chamberlain: Hanging Herm.
Below are two reviews and a longer article that Donald Judd did on John Chamberlain between 1960 and 1963. Some of Chamberlain’s sculpture - particularly the earlier work, before the sculptures became over-elaborate and before he started spraypainting the steel - looks pretty good to me now, at least a lot better than it did when I saw some of it in the film Painters Painting ten years ago (a pretty cool film, if you haven’t seen it - worth it for the accents alone). But more than the sculpture probably, I like these write-ups. You can see Judd working out his ideas from review to review as if they were little sculptures, too. Nice descriptive analysis with a focus on the unique experience at hand instead of on categorization and large Greenbergian claims. It’s clear he’s given the sculptures a good look and some solid thought.
“IN THE GALLERIES”
ARTS MAGAZINE,
FEBRUARY 1960
Three aspects are readily apparent in Chamberlain’s sculpture: it is redundant; each contains a distinct structure; and it is colored. The folded sheet metal from automobile bodies is voluminous, apparently somewhat unmanageable, and constitutes an essential form that is less than its bulk requires. It is grandiloquent, proliferating exhaust pipes, rods and billows of metal, exceedingly keen on remaining junk, and proud to be confused with an ordinary wreck. The verbosity implies the inexhaustible supply of material. The knowledgeable but not unusual organization is often fan-shaped, or of a self-enclosing kind, epibolic, occasionally spreading at the top somewhat, as if winged; Redwing—dark green, the rust, and orange—fans outward in three folds from its base. Here, as in most of the works, a disengaged strip provides a linear contrast, a necessary one and one that needs to be increased; its minor role verges on the adventitious. This open, narrow part is similar to the main ones of David Smith’s sculpture, which also stresses its materiality, but, in contrast, within a successful polarity to its structure, and, also in contrast, with economy. Chamberlain’s sculpture has an opulence and a formation suggestive of de Kooning’s paintings of 1955–56, such as Gotham News. The unique aspect is the color. The paint is folded into the convolutions of the metal and is unquestionably integral to the work. Colored sculpture has been discussed and hesitantly attempted for some time, but not with such implications. The color here is insufficient but the possibilities are exciting, and Chamberlain has a long time and the start to find them.
“IN THE GALLERIES”
ARTS MAGAZINE,
MARCH 1962
The only reason Chamberlain is not the best American sculptor under forty is the incommensurability of “the best” which makes it arbitrary to say so. In his show two years ago the crumpled automobile parts seemed redundantly voluminous, an excess which overbore the structure. There are two reasons why this objection does not apply to the present five pieces. The first, retroactive as well, is that voluminousness is not secondary but is salient in Chamberlain’s work, is his unique idea; criticism based on an admiration for the part-by-part articulation, the linearity and planarity of David Smith’s sculpture is not relevant. The seeming superfluity, openness and capacity for expansion and change of the involuted metal—this is a primary quality. If something is done freely, the activity proliferates its own distinctions, grows to contain an order not of control but of more choices. Freedom, as one aspect, and indeterminacy, as another, are for Chamberlain antecedent to and larger than order. A smaller, more easily described work is illustrative of this use of volume, of surplus and expandable tin and space. A few iron braces form a short vertical and a partial base. Leaning across the top of this, opposed to the vertical, are a loosely crushed white kitchen cabinet, the black inside surface of some bent auto part and another smashed white cabinet, all more or less the same size. Thus there are three parallel diagonals, casual and occupying a lot of space but definite. The lucid structure, more exact than in 1960, is the second reason, the actual one, why this show is unexceptionable. To indicate its stature, complexity and type, the structure can be compared to that of the Baroque; it resembles it diagrammatically but does not recall the Baroque quality as, for example, Nakian’s sculpture does. A large relief, high to the extent of four or five feet, is in part a diagonal mass across a vertical one and in whole a radiating, swastika structure. Another piece comprises a vertical white radiator hood, an offset gray-blue fender dropping below it, several truncating horizontals of red and reddish-brown and metallic gray-green and gray-blue. A less horizontal piece or two, of brighter red, enclosing a red and violet paper, rests on top of the severing parts. Chamberlain is the only sculptor really using color, the full range, not just metallic shades; his color is as particular, complex and structural as any good painter’s. In part it involves the hard, sweet, pastel enamels, frequently roses and ceruleans, of Detroit’s imitation elegance for the poor-coupled, Rooseveltianly, with reds and blues.
“CHAMBERLAIN: ANOTHER VIEW”
ART INTERNATIONAL,
DECEMBER 1963
In 1954, Chamberlain was making sculpture indebted to David Smith. It was open, linear and articulated more or less in one plane. The relevant differences were that the parts were not as distinct as those in Smith’s work and that the linearity was loose and active rather than taut. Both differences partially concealed the expert composition. Subsequently Chamberlain was interested in de Kooning’s voluminous paintings of 1955 and 1956, such as Gotham News. Having painted a little himself, he was impressed by the speed with which a painting could be started. He neither liked the methodical labor of sculpture nor its effect. It occurred to him that using crushed and colored metal was a way to have something in the beginning and a way to avoid conspicuous tinkering. In 1960, Chamberlain had a show at the Martha Jackson Gallery which was somewhat past the midpoint between the pieces influenced by Smith and the completely voluminous ones he is doing now. The work was primarily crumpled metal, but was usually organized in tumescent planes. Rods contrasted to the rectangular of fan-shaped planes or continued them in space. The color was already Chamberlainian, but was less clear than now, since dark and neutral colors reduced its extent. It was the only sculpture in which color was successful. The use of automobile metal was also new.
There is a three-way polarity of appearance and meaning in Chamberlain’s sculpture. This is produced without an equivalent disparity of form. The work is in turn neutral, redundant and expressively structured. The neutrality and the redundancy are not caused by separate elements. The structure is moderately separate. Jackson Pollock’s paintings are the most recent instance of opposed extremes. The polarity of his work, greater than that of Chamberlain’s, is based on corresponding extremes of form. A point of sensation, the immediacy of the dripped paint, is opposed to a volume of structural and imagistic forms. Chamberlain’s material does not have to be distinctly transformed to appear diversely. The diversity and the unity occur and recur; the work explodes and implodes. The proximity of the means is new. In part it is simply unique and in part it is an advance. Chamberlain’s work, for example, is more consistent than Pollock’s, not because Pollock’s great polarity is less consistent, but because the elements which form it are so, especially the shallow space and the descriptive images.
Initially and recurrently the metal is neutral, pretty much something as anything is something. A piece always seems as if that is all it is going to be. The quality of the involuted space and metal and the shape of the structure are not easily discerned. The discovery is surprising. Even after a piece is familiar, the casual objectivity recurs. Nothing is done which will contradict the ordinary appearance of the metal; the composition and the imagery are not conspicuous; the works never have regular formats.
The sculpture is redundant. There is more metal and space than the structure requires. This voluminousness is a salient aspect of the work. This idea is Chamberlain’s alone. The sculpture seems open, which, in the usual sense, it is not, since it is massed. There is not space through the work; there is a lot in it. The fulsome Miss Lucy Pink, has a diameter of a yard. Behind the metal, enameled the colors of a display of flesh-colored fingernail polish, there is perhaps only air. The metal seems superfluous because it is folded, since flat it would be larger, or if it were simply to extend the distance it does, smaller. The metal seems superfluous because its involutions enclose so much space; the form is not only metal but is also space. The metal surrounds space like the eggshell of a sucked egg, instead of defining it with a line, core or plane. The hard, sweet, pastel enamels are the colors of surfaces, not of solids. The parts are not absolute definitions of their space but appear capable of change and of expansion and contraction. When the volume is compared to the main structure of a piece, the metal and space have only the live quality the disparity produces. When the structure is analyzed, much of that metal becomes expressive detail.
Falconer-Fitten, a small, simple and easily described work, is illustrative of this use of volume. A few iron braces form a short vertical and a partial base. Leaning across the top of this are a loosely crushed white kitchen cabinet, the black inside of bent fender and another smashed white cabinet, all more or less the same size. There are three parallel diagonals. Although they are casual and occupy a lot of space, they are definite. The volume and the metal exceed the structure which they form; the activity exceeds the order which results. Freedom and indeterminacy are antecedent to and larger than order. The order of Chamberlain’s work was never a priori. The concluding order is not an essence. The order is not one of control or distillation, but of continual choices, often between accidents. An activity proliferates its own distinctions; an order forms within these. The disparity between reality and its order is the most radical and important aspect of Chamberlain’s sculpture.
The structure and the details never assume forms which will vitiate the neutral appearance or the voluminousness; the two aspects never become so general as to destroy the great particularity of the structure. The source of the divergent aspects are held more closely together than those in any other expressionistic work. The imagery, formed of the details and the structure, is, because of this, more remote than is usual. Chamberlain’s sculpture is simultaneously turbulent, passionate, cool and hard. The structure is the passionate part. The obvious comparison is to the structure of Baroque art; there is a diagrammatic resemblance and one of emotion, but certainly not one of philosophy. The success of the composition and of its fusion with the radical volume is anomalous, although less so at the present, when there are several major artists who have combined old and new elements.
Mr. Press, a relief eight feet across and four deep, is in part a diagonal mass across a vertical one and is in whole a radiating, swastika structure. A dish cloth of red stripes, several fragments and a right angle of a bumper, which trips the rotation from the center, which is the highest part of the relief. The lower half of the diagonal is a white fender and a cream one, joined to leave a straight, fast cut. The high half is a cream door, folded once. Its chrome is pulled across the fold to make a reverse continuation of the lines of the fenders. The vertical section extends at the top and at the bottom and is made of dark colors, red above and a dull brownish-red, a deep yellow and a violet below. The color, as is apparent, is structural. The combination of pastel colors and dark and intense ones is characteristic, novel, and excellent. The details are decidedly structural. A cerulean stripe on a hood, for example, one of the many radial elements and intermediate between the two main sections, is canted from the horizontal slightly, partially causing the vertical mass to tilt and the whole to rotate.
Essex, another relief, is a large, dense bow-shaped mass with a pendant keel. Huzzy is mainly a diagonal slash flipped free at the top in reversing flukes. There is one sculpture in which a white climbs and folds and a black drops as a cumbrous point. These are all magnificent. The free-standing pieces of- ten have offset or dropped sections, horizontal parts which truncate vertical ones or parts thrust in or out of a mass or wrapped around it. The structures and the shapes are those of the movement of things. The surfaces depict this movement. The imagery is either this alone or is organic as well. The resemblance to everything, because of the close means and the objective aspects, is remarkably remote. This allows the turbulence of the material an independent power.
Miscellaneous links
1. Anyone who likes Martin Kippenberger and Fischli and Weiss might find Urs Fischer inevitably interesting as well. I think they’re calling the three-floor exhibit of his work at the New Museum in New York a “retrospective,” but it’s mostly new work, for one thing, and Fischer hasn’t been around all that long for another, so “retrospective” doesn’t seem like the right word. What’s the opposite of retrospective? The critics seem to be looking not back but forward to the day when they’ll be able to attach “greatness” to him in good conscience - at least Jerry Saltz is. His review is a fun one. And here’s Roberta Smith’s. I love the title, or name, of the exhibit: Marguerite de Ponty. Once again, I wish I was living in New York. Alas, I content myself with jpegs.
2. The Genius of Howard Hawks by Jacques Rivette. (via secondopiano).
3. Dave Eggers on Kurt Vonnegut.
4. On Repressive Sentimentalism by Mark Greif. Greif is an essayist and founder of N+1 magazine (I think he might be a professor as well - don’t want to shortchange him). I first heard about him in the Best American Essays 2007 collection in which he had an amazing piece about pornography and the trend toward younger and younger sexual ideals, which climaxed with a kind of triumphal call for mature adult sexuality. It was definitely a stand-out in that group. This latest piece, a good bet for the next BAE, is about the legalization of gay marriage and rejecting the institution of marriage. I think he calls the one a step toward the other, paradoxically. Here’s a little section of it…
“The appeal to anomie simply ignores, post-1960s, the emotional capacities we’ve gained. We now resist atomization and anomie with the wide range of unusually warm, non-exclusive and simultaneous friendships, often verging on erotism but not compelled to it, both across and within the sexes, and among straights and gays—this extraordinary birthright the ’60s gave to all those of us born, say, after 1969. The range is better than any narrowing. The multiplicity of friendships trumps the marriage structure. Yet these relations really survive, and thrive, only until marriage begins to clear its throat, and they are jeopardized by the cowardly constraints of couplehood. Marriage is lye poured upon the petri dish of the new relations of erotic sociality.
“For better and worse (and for richer and for poorer), marriage is also almost inevitably intolerable to any post-’60s individual who counts the accumulation of strong experience and passionate feeling as the sine qua non of meaningful existence.”
5. I laughed at this mini-dialogue on the Bookslut blog a few weeks ago, about the London Review of Books…
“They don’t actually review books!” “I know. Aren’t they great?”
The more highly-esteemed the periodical, the greater chance there is that the writer assigned the book to review will use it as a chance to forward his own views on the topic, sparing one or two meagre lines of print for the book ostensibly being reviewed. That’s a fact of life. Though it would be nice to have thoroughly read books and incisive in-depth critiques of them, it’s also nice what we’re getting now. There’s been a lot of good stuff in there lately. I like the wispy art pieces that they obviously think aren’t worth charging money for. There are a few of them, and some other things I’ve read in there lately, below…
Julian Bell on Van Gogh’s letters.
Fredric Jameson on Margaret Atwood.
William Feaver in the studio with Frank Auerbach.
Bridget Riley talks about drawing!
Frank Kermode on Auden’s lectures on Shakespeare.
William Empson on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
6. Lil Wayne’s latest mixtape, No Ceilings. Monumentally crappy! Synth brass is making a major comeback; when it’s riffing on Thus Spake Zarathustra, irony verges on headache. But the shoddiness is part of what makes it cool, and there are always a few things that surprise you in some way or another. For me, the surprises are the tracks “Single” and “Break Up” this time. He’s getting into these weird, stripped-down, resolutely unfunky beats that, especially in contrast to some of the other tracks, sound sleek and kind of sophisticated - because of, not just despite, their trashiness. I can’t really account for it.
About talking about looking at art
I read T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death this year and, to be honest, was a little let down. Clark, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, spent a year looking at two Poussin paintings and kept a diary of the looking process, of the paintings over time. I didn’t think it quite lived up to the hugely enthusiastic praise it drew, but the point was well made: critics and art-lovers alike have to get back to looking at painting, and writers shouldn’t think the obvious - the observable facts of the paintings - is too obvious to mention. Looking with patience means abandoning the pre-formulated theory and politics we might bring to paintings, and it also means forgetting the things we know or think we know about them in order to see them anew.
Here’s Clark in The Sight of Death: “Some readers, I suspect, will not understand, and maybe not sympathize with, the separation effected in these two books [this one and another one he wrote] between - let’s use the labels crudely - a real-world politics written about from a Left perspective and a small, sealed realm of visualizations dwelt in fiercely for their own sake, on their own terms. That there are problems resulting from such a split I recognize. But the splitting itself I do not apologize for. It is a tactic - a necessity - born from the horror of the times. And better by far a splitting - an admission of the “political” and the “aesthetic” as at present the torn halves of a totality to which, however, they do not add up - than the alternative currently on offer in so much of the Left academy. Which is to say, a constant, cursory hauling of visual (or verbal) images before the court of political judgement - with the politics deployed by the prosecution usually as undernourished and instrumentalized as the account given of what the image in question might have to “say.”
“The enemy now is not the old picture of visual imaging as pursued in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns, but the parody notion we have come to live with of its belonging to the world, its incorporation into it, its being “fully part” of a certain image regime. Being fully part means, it turns out in practice, being at any tawdry ideology’s service. And this is celebrated. It is the sign of art’s coming down from its ivory tower.”
“I believe the distance of visual imagery from verbal discourse is the most precious thing about it. It represents one possibility of resistance in a world saturated by slogans, labels, sales pitches, little marketable meaning-motifs…”
I’ve come across a series of lectures on Picasso between the wars, the paintings in the twenties that led to Guernica that Clark did at the National Gallery (made into podcasts - scroll down on this page to find them) and, if you can find the images on the internet (and if you enjoy this sort of thing), they’re very enjoyable indeed. Clark takes time to describe the paintings. You’d think so rudimentary, so obvious a part of art criticism would go without saying. That it doesn’t, that it seems surprising, that I was tempted to put the word in italics, shows how far art discourse has gotten from aesthetics.
Description isn’t nearly as bland as it sounds. It mirrors what it is we’re doing when we look closely, and the process of putting into words what it is we’re seeing suggests approaches to analysis and interpretation that couldn’t have come about other than through specificity. Not that there is a single right way to read a painting or that you are lashed slavishly to what’s there without the possibility of expressing your own ideas. Description leads invariably to metaphor, which can lead quite far from the painting, though hopefully run parallel to it. But the point is that the work should suggest the ideas, not the ideas the painting. And a good description is a writerly feat in itself; when done especially well, an art.
There also seems to be a misconception floating around that some things are either too boring, rudimentary, or just well-known to be bothered with saying. It’s as though close-reading (in whatever art form) and discussions of form were best left to school kids, while the critics with something to say ought to remain up in the unreadable stratosphere. Exploring (or exploring again) the things that have been going without saying - matters of color, space, balance, shape, line, texture (and applicable opposites) - would, I’m sure, be as vital an experience to professionals as it would be to laypeople. Who, for example, could look at Velazquez’s portrait of Don Diego de Acedo and be gravely concerned about the social position of dwarves in the 17th century Spanish court, missing those voluptuous books? - one covers the dwarf like a duvet. It’s not simplistic or naive to relish these details. Or if it is, it is precisely this holiday that good art affords us.
This looking process also suggests a path to evaluation. I know that’s kind of out of style, but I’m talking about a personal criteria, not a universal or canonical one, and for me that criteria has mainly to do with interest. Long term interest is as good a proof as were likely to get of value, and it can’t really be faked. You can lie about it, but not to yourself. This is also implicit in Clark’s year of looking. A year wasn’t enough to exhaust the Poussins for him. They continued to generate and renew interest. Things that he’d seen and described one way, are seen and described again and again in the same and different ways. I wouldn’t say longevity is necessarily the last word in art (I was just thinking about Helio Oiticia’s work and how it seems to live off a contrary notion), but a certain honesty among people who spend time looking at art, if they really do care enough to spend the time, would, I believe, reveal a much broader consensus than is fashionable to imagine on what is worthy of the time, and if not consensus then at least a basis on which to talk about art in a meaningful, democratic, and enlivening way.
Along the same lines: Curator and writer Robert Storr was part of a panel discussion about the intersection of art and theory at the Frieze Art Fair just a week or two ago (also available as a podcast). If there was a transcript of his brief but stimulating portion of that lecture, I’d quote everything he said. (If there was a teddy bear of what he said, for that matter, I’d hug it till the stuffing came out.) There isn’t - neither - so here’s the link to the audio.
Can’t seem to finish footnoting this post: my heart blushed when Clark, in one of the first few lectures, turns a Picasso sideways (I’m taking his word for it, obviously I didn’t see him do it), validating somewhat a habit of my own that I guess must come out of an urge to plumb the pictures’ formal conundrums, but feels embarrassingly avid somehow. (And that’s not the full extent of it: I also sometimes reduce the images to greyscale. Sometimes I cut out the figures. It’s geeky.) The Picasso he flips holds up especially well, but one imagines a lot of cubist paintings would. Sideways, you can almost imagine a figure taking shape here. I’m surprised Picasso the showboat, the Picasso in Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso, didn’t do some stunt like that - making a painting that works equally well on its side.
Anyone interested in those lectures, or in Picasso, should know about this site. It’s a database of Picasso’s entire output. It used to be an even better resource. You could blow the pictures up. Now they’ve limited it to a thumbnail view and a kind of magnifying glass tool that allows you to see a zoomed-in detail view of so small an area that you can’t put it in its context. I’ve contacted them and this is how it’s going to be from now on, which is pretty disappointing. Still, it’s good if you want to trace Picasso’s work by year. Some of you want to do that from time to time, right?
Personal Author Constellation, 2009.
Quintessential blogging today. It’s a pretty standard assortment, isn’t it? No far-flung Herta Muellers, no sportive Dan Browns. It’s much like the Modern Library’s author constellation. But what can I say - these are the authors that I read and admired most this year. Much like last year, probably much like next year. Honourable mentions to Waugh and Capote, both of which authors I read for the first time this year and also got pretty into.
Luc Tuymans: Orchid and Der Diagnostische Blick IV.
Luc Tuymans interviews are cropping up (here, here, here) now that a mid-career retrospective of his work has started its 16 month trip around the US. Unfortunately, Peter Schjeldahl’s characteristically excellent review in the New Yorker isn’t available online. It’s worth the price of the magazine or a trip to the library if you like either him or Tuymans. Here are a couple of bits that I liked…
“…Tuymans discovers in the very humiliation of the medium a vitality as surprising as a rosebush on the moon. He does so with nothing-to-lose audacity, in terms of subject matter. If painting has nothing significant left to say, he seems to reason, it might as well say nothing about significant things.”
“”He told Artnet that in his initial hours of work, “until I get to the middle of the process - it’s horrific. It’s like I don’t know what I’m doing but I know how to do it, and it’s very strange.” Now, that - uncertain ends, confident means - is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know. It illuminates and justifies Tuymans’s eccentric work rule, with its distant redolence of Jackson Pollock’s odd decision to paint in the air above a canvas. The unities of form and feeling in Tuymans’s work may be shallow - as, under time pressure, he seizes upon whatever resolution of a picture first beckons. But the effect is thrillingly open-ended, as if the work were still in the act of coming to its point, dragooning the eyes and minds of viewers to that enterprise.”
Gold, Fingers.
Despite something throwaway about Tuymans paintings - each painted in a day and looking (just looking) haphazardly conceived, the imagery, drab and unfocused, culled from the multiplying stocks of the nearly unlooked-at - it’s surprising how many of his works are stealthily making their way into popular art iconography (the two at the top of this post are good examples; both pop up wherever there’s anything being said about the state of painting today). Maybe it’s something about the way his paintings slow imagery down to a pace where creation coincides with absorption that registers with people, or seems necessary. Maybe the air paranoia and distrust inscribed into them is recognizably our own. This is just the opposite of the big picture. Here, the excluded, the stuff outside the frame far outweighs the little we’re given. That imbalance against our favour accounts for at least some of the unease we feel looking at the paintings; (and, gluttons for punishment that we are, it also accounts for some of their magnetism: shrugging is the new enlightenment). In Tuymans, there is a paranoiac knot binding the opposed threads of utter triviality and looming significance, all appeals to reason interrupted by the dizzyingly banal, like jokes told at a crime scene.
The Secretary of State.
While I’m pooling links, here’s an audio interview with Tuymans by John Tusa of BBC 3 from, I think, a few years back. There are some other good interviews on that site, too.
Chris Ofili: The Raising of Lazarus.
I think he said it was blowfish fins in the sake flavouring it. Then he lit it on fire.
Critics Unanimous: New Hirst Paintings Stinking Up England
I almost feel sorry for Damien Hirst, what with the huge (and much-deserved) assault he’s taking in the British press for his new (honest-to-god hand-made) Bacon imitations. (Anyone who reads his interviews knows how much of a fan he is but treading onto Bacon’s turf so blatantly only reveals the gross disparity between the two.) Paragraph after delerious paragraph of shit-kicking; the critics are having a field day. Here’s a roundup of some of their comments…
Tom Lubbock: “They’re thoroughly derivative. Their handling is weak. They’re extremely boring. I’m not saying that he’s absolutely hopeless. But I’m not saying he’s any good either. There are many degrees of painting. There are many painters in evening classes much worse than Hirst. On the other hand, you’d find quite a few who were better, too. To try to be accurate: Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student. He is in his mid-forties.
“There are dozens of youngsters who turn up at our art schools each year, doing this turgid teen-angst stuff. And many of them are deluded enough, in their innocence, to think that their work is “deeply connected to the past.” Their teachers have to scold and embarrass them out of these bad habits.”
Rachel Campbell-Johnston: ”…a pale, silk-papered boudoir transforms into what feels more like a teenage boy’s bedroom. You can almost smell the brooding odours of existential angst.
“Here are all Hirst’s familiar obsessions: the skulls, the shark’s jaws, the ashtrays, the spots with the odd iguana or little O-level, “still life” lemon added to the mix. Hirst floats his images on the dark surface of the canvas, mapping out their spaces and relationships with a mesh of perspective lines.
“These works are utterly derivative of Bacon (give or take a dash of Giacometti), but they completely lack his painterly skill. And their metaphors are as ham-fisted as the application of pigment.”
Jonathan Jones: “It is shocking to see an artist so successful in arguing that art owes nothing to its past, sacrifice himself to that past. Hirst’s exhibition is a stupefying admission of defeat, a self-obliterating homage, that reveals the most successful artist of our time to be a tiny talent, with less to offer than even the most obscure Victorian painter in the Wallace Collection, let alone its Fragonards and Rembrandts. He reveals this because he chooses to meet them on their own terms, as a painter.”
Adrian Searle: ”Hirst’s paintings lack the kind of theatricality and grandeur that made Bacon succeed. At its worst, Hirst’s drawing just looks amateurish and adolescent. His brushwork lacks that oomph and panache that makes you believe in the painter’s lies. He can’t yet carry it off.
“Whatever his borrowings, Hirst did all this himself, unaided by his armies of assistants. He fills up his art with dead things: even the iguanas look stuffed. But these paintings are a memento mori for a reputation.”
Kafka sketch
Helio Oiticica
Artinfo: 90% of Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica’s work goes up in flames.
Oiticica was always a bit of a mythical figure in the first place, his work not too often seen. The majority of his career output disappearing will probably only cement the legend, not that that ameliorates the loss. He’ll become, as greg allen at greg.org puts it, “a digital ghost, haunting artists and art historians of the future.”
Among the works lost, apparently, are those he was perhaps most known for, the Bolides. I particularly like the Box Bolides, a set of genially ramshackle plywood sculptures that breathe fresh air into stuffy modernist geometry (one example above).
Helio Oiticica: some of the Spatial Reliefs
There is something equally warm and earthy about all of Oiticica’s work. His Spatial Reliefs are like plywood or construction paper origami; the Metaesquemas (examples below), make me imagine Matisse, Saul Bass, and Kazimir Malevich getting together for an afternoon tea party in some breezy hotel in the tropics, getting down on their hands and knees with some paints for a few hours, and coming out with a set of the most effervescent but elegant caprices you can imagine; his Parangolés were like wearable paintings, designed to be worn while dancing. Art never gets too far away from the bodies that make it and live with it with Oiticica.
some Metaesquemas
Oiticica’s pieces are mostly just boxes, paper, cloth, and color. They seem almost egoless - like growing a garden is egoless - relying more on revelations of form and color, the small experience, than on revelations of self. Which isn’t to say they are cold or impersonal - just the opposite. But they seem to say You too could make beautiful art like this everyday. They seem also to acknowledge certain limits - refreshingly. They are not inexhaustibly deep and - the fire unfortunately proves it - they weren’t made to last forever. Looking at them, you’re charmed by them but then you drop them and do something else. And that’s more than enough. For some people, art’s just part of life, like clothing, and as essential as eating. It’s not everything but it’s part of everything. Not all art makes such an affirmation of being forgettable.
Take a look at some more of Oiticica’s work here on the Tate’s site for the Oiticica retrospective it held a few years ago. An excellent overview of his output there.
Jim Jarmusch: The Limits of Control. 2009.
Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control is structured around two conceits optimized to give him space to fill with stuff he likes - paintings, beautiful women, well-dressed men, cigarettes and coffee - and in which to air his meditations on film and - yes - the meaning of existence, among other things: 1) the repetition of motifs such as his lone man’s “two esspressos in separate cups,” and 2) the Point Blank / Le Samourai undistractible-agent-on-an-unintelligible-mission-slash-existential-quest story. With the second, any diversion can be assimilated and the more out of the way, the more ambiguous the connection to the mystery - the mystery of what the lone man is involved in (does he know? will we ever find out? did he learn something by going to the art gallery?), the more absorbing it tends to be, and the more liberating it is for the filmmaker.
Beyond having expressly mentioned Point Blank in interviews and naming his production company after it, the references to the earlier film in The Limits of Control are many. The final encounter between Isaach De Bankolé and Bill Murray is a shorter and much less compelling reversal of the one between Lee Marvin and Carroll O’Connor in Point Blank. It serves to reveal the shortcomings of the former film, though Jarmusch’s aims seem completely different and his film, in a way, is more into smoking (something) than competing, anyway. His film is a scrapbook, loose and accomodating, and for the most part convivial despite its coolness; Point Blank is a cold, polished stone.
That balance of coolness and warmth, seriousness and lightness, is a little awkward, and often the dialogue, casually philosophical, and the somewhat trite, photogenic quirkiness of everything, comes close to grating. But the film isn’t boring and there is one scene on a train, its images surreally bright and crisp, windmills on what could be a lunar landscape out the window, that does something special; the train might as well be drifting through space.
Albrecht Dürer: Great Piece of Turf.
Pedro Almodovar: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. 1988.
At the top of my list of film discoveries this year is Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. After watching it I can understand why some critics are disappointed with Broken Embraces, Almodovar’s latest, in comparison to his earlier, maybe less self-conscious films. There is so much trashy spontaneity in Women, and gawdy colors, foot-level camera angles, soundstage sunsets, soapy comedy (the lighter side of the same things that influenced Fassbinder perhaps), yet the design elements never overpower the characters.
Led by Carmen Maura, an Almodovar regular, the actors are given plenty of breathing room and an interested - not to say fawning - camera. There is little that is really painful in the film. It feels like the director can barely stand to cause these women sorrow, and whatever sadness there is is mainly of a half-campy kind that only advantages their charm and beauty in his eyes. It is movie hardship that they go through, never without its attendant glamour. On the other hand, there is a real heart here, too. You sense that, like the taxi driver always improbably there for Pepa (Maura), tears streaming down his face at the sight of hers, the plights of film heroines affect Almodovar deeply, that while their difficulties bring out an aestheticized allure in them, that women on film are quite as real to him as flesh and blood.
Among the many moments that snap with magic, one in particular near the end stood out for me. An older woman (Julieta Serrano), the film’s antagonist, if there is one, has hopped onto the back of a motorcycle to race to the airport. Almodovar shows her head in profile, minus her dowdy glasses, hair blowing in the wind instead of unattractively permed, in what strikes me as an allusion to the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. Only, the camera stays on her long enough to let us see something resilient and still very beautiful in that aging, windblown face, long enough for us to glimpse what she might have looked like at Pepa’s age - a beautiful woman herself, not the frumpy, hormonal one forced into the role of the jealous old witch. It’s a stunningly compassionate moment tucked in unexpectedly amidst the action of a chase scene and the general lightness of the film’s comic mode. Could Almodovar have planned this revelation, or was he just ready and watching that closely?
It’s a good example of another thing, besides the acting, that makes the film exciting - the hypersensitivity to everything it comes in contact with, animate or not, and the fleetness that allows it to follow sensation where it leads. The sensuousness of ripe tomatoes being cut (referred back to in Broken Embraces), the shiny wood of the hotel banister - few films are as alertly, promiscuously distractible and I can’t imagine many directors being able to indulge that impulse and still come out with a film that feels controlled and, in its way, tight. But the film sticks together, partly, I think, because the focus on characters is not lost, but also because, as David Thomson says in his review of it, “film is friendly to anyone who will try anything.” Thoroughgoing gusto makes its own coherence.
A macaque in Nagano - they’re as plentiful there as squirrels in Canada.
Hot Titles (7): Greenaway: A Walk Through H
John Chamberlain: Hanging Herm.
Below are two reviews and a longer article that Donald Judd did on John Chamberlain between 1960 and 1963. Some of Chamberlain’s sculpture - particularly the earlier work, before the sculptures became over-elaborate and before he started spraypainting the steel - looks pretty good to me now, at least a lot better than it did when I saw some of it in the film Painters Painting ten years ago (a pretty cool film, if you haven’t seen it - worth it for the accents alone). But more than the sculpture probably, I like these write-ups. You can see Judd working out his ideas from review to review as if they were little sculptures, too. Nice descriptive analysis with a focus on the unique experience at hand instead of on categorization and large Greenbergian claims. It’s clear he’s given the sculptures a good look and some solid thought.
“IN THE GALLERIES”
ARTS MAGAZINE,
FEBRUARY 1960
Three aspects are readily apparent in Chamberlain’s sculpture: it is redundant; each contains a distinct structure; and it is colored. The folded sheet metal from automobile bodies is voluminous, apparently somewhat unmanageable, and constitutes an essential form that is less than its bulk requires. It is grandiloquent, proliferating exhaust pipes, rods and billows of metal, exceedingly keen on remaining junk, and proud to be confused with an ordinary wreck. The verbosity implies the inexhaustible supply of material. The knowledgeable but not unusual organization is often fan-shaped, or of a self-enclosing kind, epibolic, occasionally spreading at the top somewhat, as if winged; Redwing—dark green, the rust, and orange—fans outward in three folds from its base. Here, as in most of the works, a disengaged strip provides a linear contrast, a necessary one and one that needs to be increased; its minor role verges on the adventitious. This open, narrow part is similar to the main ones of David Smith’s sculpture, which also stresses its materiality, but, in contrast, within a successful polarity to its structure, and, also in contrast, with economy. Chamberlain’s sculpture has an opulence and a formation suggestive of de Kooning’s paintings of 1955–56, such as Gotham News. The unique aspect is the color. The paint is folded into the convolutions of the metal and is unquestionably integral to the work. Colored sculpture has been discussed and hesitantly attempted for some time, but not with such implications. The color here is insufficient but the possibilities are exciting, and Chamberlain has a long time and the start to find them.
“IN THE GALLERIES”
ARTS MAGAZINE,
MARCH 1962
The only reason Chamberlain is not the best American sculptor under forty is the incommensurability of “the best” which makes it arbitrary to say so. In his show two years ago the crumpled automobile parts seemed redundantly voluminous, an excess which overbore the structure. There are two reasons why this objection does not apply to the present five pieces. The first, retroactive as well, is that voluminousness is not secondary but is salient in Chamberlain’s work, is his unique idea; criticism based on an admiration for the part-by-part articulation, the linearity and planarity of David Smith’s sculpture is not relevant. The seeming superfluity, openness and capacity for expansion and change of the involuted metal—this is a primary quality. If something is done freely, the activity proliferates its own distinctions, grows to contain an order not of control but of more choices. Freedom, as one aspect, and indeterminacy, as another, are for Chamberlain antecedent to and larger than order. A smaller, more easily described work is illustrative of this use of volume, of surplus and expandable tin and space. A few iron braces form a short vertical and a partial base. Leaning across the top of this, opposed to the vertical, are a loosely crushed white kitchen cabinet, the black inside surface of some bent auto part and another smashed white cabinet, all more or less the same size. Thus there are three parallel diagonals, casual and occupying a lot of space but definite. The lucid structure, more exact than in 1960, is the second reason, the actual one, why this show is unexceptionable. To indicate its stature, complexity and type, the structure can be compared to that of the Baroque; it resembles it diagrammatically but does not recall the Baroque quality as, for example, Nakian’s sculpture does. A large relief, high to the extent of four or five feet, is in part a diagonal mass across a vertical one and in whole a radiating, swastika structure. Another piece comprises a vertical white radiator hood, an offset gray-blue fender dropping below it, several truncating horizontals of red and reddish-brown and metallic gray-green and gray-blue. A less horizontal piece or two, of brighter red, enclosing a red and violet paper, rests on top of the severing parts. Chamberlain is the only sculptor really using color, the full range, not just metallic shades; his color is as particular, complex and structural as any good painter’s. In part it involves the hard, sweet, pastel enamels, frequently roses and ceruleans, of Detroit’s imitation elegance for the poor-coupled, Rooseveltianly, with reds and blues.
“CHAMBERLAIN: ANOTHER VIEW”
ART INTERNATIONAL,
DECEMBER 1963
In 1954, Chamberlain was making sculpture indebted to David Smith. It was open, linear and articulated more or less in one plane. The relevant differences were that the parts were not as distinct as those in Smith’s work and that the linearity was loose and active rather than taut. Both differences partially concealed the expert composition. Subsequently Chamberlain was interested in de Kooning’s voluminous paintings of 1955 and 1956, such as Gotham News. Having painted a little himself, he was impressed by the speed with which a painting could be started. He neither liked the methodical labor of sculpture nor its effect. It occurred to him that using crushed and colored metal was a way to have something in the beginning and a way to avoid conspicuous tinkering. In 1960, Chamberlain had a show at the Martha Jackson Gallery which was somewhat past the midpoint between the pieces influenced by Smith and the completely voluminous ones he is doing now. The work was primarily crumpled metal, but was usually organized in tumescent planes. Rods contrasted to the rectangular of fan-shaped planes or continued them in space. The color was already Chamberlainian, but was less clear than now, since dark and neutral colors reduced its extent. It was the only sculpture in which color was successful. The use of automobile metal was also new.
There is a three-way polarity of appearance and meaning in Chamberlain’s sculpture. This is produced without an equivalent disparity of form. The work is in turn neutral, redundant and expressively structured. The neutrality and the redundancy are not caused by separate elements. The structure is moderately separate. Jackson Pollock’s paintings are the most recent instance of opposed extremes. The polarity of his work, greater than that of Chamberlain’s, is based on corresponding extremes of form. A point of sensation, the immediacy of the dripped paint, is opposed to a volume of structural and imagistic forms. Chamberlain’s material does not have to be distinctly transformed to appear diversely. The diversity and the unity occur and recur; the work explodes and implodes. The proximity of the means is new. In part it is simply unique and in part it is an advance. Chamberlain’s work, for example, is more consistent than Pollock’s, not because Pollock’s great polarity is less consistent, but because the elements which form it are so, especially the shallow space and the descriptive images.
Initially and recurrently the metal is neutral, pretty much something as anything is something. A piece always seems as if that is all it is going to be. The quality of the involuted space and metal and the shape of the structure are not easily discerned. The discovery is surprising. Even after a piece is familiar, the casual objectivity recurs. Nothing is done which will contradict the ordinary appearance of the metal; the composition and the imagery are not conspicuous; the works never have regular formats.
The sculpture is redundant. There is more metal and space than the structure requires. This voluminousness is a salient aspect of the work. This idea is Chamberlain’s alone. The sculpture seems open, which, in the usual sense, it is not, since it is massed. There is not space through the work; there is a lot in it. The fulsome Miss Lucy Pink, has a diameter of a yard. Behind the metal, enameled the colors of a display of flesh-colored fingernail polish, there is perhaps only air. The metal seems superfluous because it is folded, since flat it would be larger, or if it were simply to extend the distance it does, smaller. The metal seems superfluous because its involutions enclose so much space; the form is not only metal but is also space. The metal surrounds space like the eggshell of a sucked egg, instead of defining it with a line, core or plane. The hard, sweet, pastel enamels are the colors of surfaces, not of solids. The parts are not absolute definitions of their space but appear capable of change and of expansion and contraction. When the volume is compared to the main structure of a piece, the metal and space have only the live quality the disparity produces. When the structure is analyzed, much of that metal becomes expressive detail.
Falconer-Fitten, a small, simple and easily described work, is illustrative of this use of volume. A few iron braces form a short vertical and a partial base. Leaning across the top of this are a loosely crushed white kitchen cabinet, the black inside of bent fender and another smashed white cabinet, all more or less the same size. There are three parallel diagonals. Although they are casual and occupy a lot of space, they are definite. The volume and the metal exceed the structure which they form; the activity exceeds the order which results. Freedom and indeterminacy are antecedent to and larger than order. The order of Chamberlain’s work was never a priori. The concluding order is not an essence. The order is not one of control or distillation, but of continual choices, often between accidents. An activity proliferates its own distinctions; an order forms within these. The disparity between reality and its order is the most radical and important aspect of Chamberlain’s sculpture.
The structure and the details never assume forms which will vitiate the neutral appearance or the voluminousness; the two aspects never become so general as to destroy the great particularity of the structure. The source of the divergent aspects are held more closely together than those in any other expressionistic work. The imagery, formed of the details and the structure, is, because of this, more remote than is usual. Chamberlain’s sculpture is simultaneously turbulent, passionate, cool and hard. The structure is the passionate part. The obvious comparison is to the structure of Baroque art; there is a diagrammatic resemblance and one of emotion, but certainly not one of philosophy. The success of the composition and of its fusion with the radical volume is anomalous, although less so at the present, when there are several major artists who have combined old and new elements.
Mr. Press, a relief eight feet across and four deep, is in part a diagonal mass across a vertical one and is in whole a radiating, swastika structure. A dish cloth of red stripes, several fragments and a right angle of a bumper, which trips the rotation from the center, which is the highest part of the relief. The lower half of the diagonal is a white fender and a cream one, joined to leave a straight, fast cut. The high half is a cream door, folded once. Its chrome is pulled across the fold to make a reverse continuation of the lines of the fenders. The vertical section extends at the top and at the bottom and is made of dark colors, red above and a dull brownish-red, a deep yellow and a violet below. The color, as is apparent, is structural. The combination of pastel colors and dark and intense ones is characteristic, novel, and excellent. The details are decidedly structural. A cerulean stripe on a hood, for example, one of the many radial elements and intermediate between the two main sections, is canted from the horizontal slightly, partially causing the vertical mass to tilt and the whole to rotate.
Essex, another relief, is a large, dense bow-shaped mass with a pendant keel. Huzzy is mainly a diagonal slash flipped free at the top in reversing flukes. There is one sculpture in which a white climbs and folds and a black drops as a cumbrous point. These are all magnificent. The free-standing pieces of- ten have offset or dropped sections, horizontal parts which truncate vertical ones or parts thrust in or out of a mass or wrapped around it. The structures and the shapes are those of the movement of things. The surfaces depict this movement. The imagery is either this alone or is organic as well. The resemblance to everything, because of the close means and the objective aspects, is remarkably remote. This allows the turbulence of the material an independent power.
Miscellaneous links
1. Anyone who likes Martin Kippenberger and Fischli and Weiss might find Urs Fischer inevitably interesting as well. I think they’re calling the three-floor exhibit of his work at the New Museum in New York a “retrospective,” but it’s mostly new work, for one thing, and Fischer hasn’t been around all that long for another, so “retrospective” doesn’t seem like the right word. What’s the opposite of retrospective? The critics seem to be looking not back but forward to the day when they’ll be able to attach “greatness” to him in good conscience - at least Jerry Saltz is. His review is a fun one. And here’s Roberta Smith’s. I love the title, or name, of the exhibit: Marguerite de Ponty. Once again, I wish I was living in New York. Alas, I content myself with jpegs.
2. The Genius of Howard Hawks by Jacques Rivette. (via secondopiano).
3. Dave Eggers on Kurt Vonnegut.
4. On Repressive Sentimentalism by Mark Greif. Greif is an essayist and founder of N+1 magazine (I think he might be a professor as well - don’t want to shortchange him). I first heard about him in the Best American Essays 2007 collection in which he had an amazing piece about pornography and the trend toward younger and younger sexual ideals, which climaxed with a kind of triumphal call for mature adult sexuality. It was definitely a stand-out in that group. This latest piece, a good bet for the next BAE, is about the legalization of gay marriage and rejecting the institution of marriage. I think he calls the one a step toward the other, paradoxically. Here’s a little section of it…
“The appeal to anomie simply ignores, post-1960s, the emotional capacities we’ve gained. We now resist atomization and anomie with the wide range of unusually warm, non-exclusive and simultaneous friendships, often verging on erotism but not compelled to it, both across and within the sexes, and among straights and gays—this extraordinary birthright the ’60s gave to all those of us born, say, after 1969. The range is better than any narrowing. The multiplicity of friendships trumps the marriage structure. Yet these relations really survive, and thrive, only until marriage begins to clear its throat, and they are jeopardized by the cowardly constraints of couplehood. Marriage is lye poured upon the petri dish of the new relations of erotic sociality.
“For better and worse (and for richer and for poorer), marriage is also almost inevitably intolerable to any post-’60s individual who counts the accumulation of strong experience and passionate feeling as the sine qua non of meaningful existence.”
5. I laughed at this mini-dialogue on the Bookslut blog a few weeks ago, about the London Review of Books…
“They don’t actually review books!” “I know. Aren’t they great?”
The more highly-esteemed the periodical, the greater chance there is that the writer assigned the book to review will use it as a chance to forward his own views on the topic, sparing one or two meagre lines of print for the book ostensibly being reviewed. That’s a fact of life. Though it would be nice to have thoroughly read books and incisive in-depth critiques of them, it’s also nice what we’re getting now. There’s been a lot of good stuff in there lately. I like the wispy art pieces that they obviously think aren’t worth charging money for. There are a few of them, and some other things I’ve read in there lately, below…
Julian Bell on Van Gogh’s letters.
Fredric Jameson on Margaret Atwood.
William Feaver in the studio with Frank Auerbach.
Bridget Riley talks about drawing!
Frank Kermode on Auden’s lectures on Shakespeare.
William Empson on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
6. Lil Wayne’s latest mixtape, No Ceilings. Monumentally crappy! Synth brass is making a major comeback; when it’s riffing on Thus Spake Zarathustra, irony verges on headache. But the shoddiness is part of what makes it cool, and there are always a few things that surprise you in some way or another. For me, the surprises are the tracks “Single” and “Break Up” this time. He’s getting into these weird, stripped-down, resolutely unfunky beats that, especially in contrast to some of the other tracks, sound sleek and kind of sophisticated - because of, not just despite, their trashiness. I can’t really account for it.
About talking about looking at art
I read T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death this year and, to be honest, was a little let down. Clark, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, spent a year looking at two Poussin paintings and kept a diary of the looking process, of the paintings over time. I didn’t think it quite lived up to the hugely enthusiastic praise it drew, but the point was well made: critics and art-lovers alike have to get back to looking at painting, and writers shouldn’t think the obvious - the observable facts of the paintings - is too obvious to mention. Looking with patience means abandoning the pre-formulated theory and politics we might bring to paintings, and it also means forgetting the things we know or think we know about them in order to see them anew.
Here’s Clark in The Sight of Death: “Some readers, I suspect, will not understand, and maybe not sympathize with, the separation effected in these two books [this one and another one he wrote] between - let’s use the labels crudely - a real-world politics written about from a Left perspective and a small, sealed realm of visualizations dwelt in fiercely for their own sake, on their own terms. That there are problems resulting from such a split I recognize. But the splitting itself I do not apologize for. It is a tactic - a necessity - born from the horror of the times. And better by far a splitting - an admission of the “political” and the “aesthetic” as at present the torn halves of a totality to which, however, they do not add up - than the alternative currently on offer in so much of the Left academy. Which is to say, a constant, cursory hauling of visual (or verbal) images before the court of political judgement - with the politics deployed by the prosecution usually as undernourished and instrumentalized as the account given of what the image in question might have to “say.”
“The enemy now is not the old picture of visual imaging as pursued in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns, but the parody notion we have come to live with of its belonging to the world, its incorporation into it, its being “fully part” of a certain image regime. Being fully part means, it turns out in practice, being at any tawdry ideology’s service. And this is celebrated. It is the sign of art’s coming down from its ivory tower.”
“I believe the distance of visual imagery from verbal discourse is the most precious thing about it. It represents one possibility of resistance in a world saturated by slogans, labels, sales pitches, little marketable meaning-motifs…”
I’ve come across a series of lectures on Picasso between the wars, the paintings in the twenties that led to Guernica that Clark did at the National Gallery (made into podcasts - scroll down on this page to find them) and, if you can find the images on the internet (and if you enjoy this sort of thing), they’re very enjoyable indeed. Clark takes time to describe the paintings. You’d think so rudimentary, so obvious a part of art criticism would go without saying. That it doesn’t, that it seems surprising, that I was tempted to put the word in italics, shows how far art discourse has gotten from aesthetics.
Description isn’t nearly as bland as it sounds. It mirrors what it is we’re doing when we look closely, and the process of putting into words what it is we’re seeing suggests approaches to analysis and interpretation that couldn’t have come about other than through specificity. Not that there is a single right way to read a painting or that you are lashed slavishly to what’s there without the possibility of expressing your own ideas. Description leads invariably to metaphor, which can lead quite far from the painting, though hopefully run parallel to it. But the point is that the work should suggest the ideas, not the ideas the painting. And a good description is a writerly feat in itself; when done especially well, an art.
There also seems to be a misconception floating around that some things are either too boring, rudimentary, or just well-known to be bothered with saying. It’s as though close-reading (in whatever art form) and discussions of form were best left to school kids, while the critics with something to say ought to remain up in the unreadable stratosphere. Exploring (or exploring again) the things that have been going without saying - matters of color, space, balance, shape, line, texture (and applicable opposites) - would, I’m sure, be as vital an experience to professionals as it would be to laypeople. Who, for example, could look at Velazquez’s portrait of Don Diego de Acedo and be gravely concerned about the social position of dwarves in the 17th century Spanish court, missing those voluptuous books? - one covers the dwarf like a duvet. It’s not simplistic or naive to relish these details. Or if it is, it is precisely this holiday that good art affords us.
This looking process also suggests a path to evaluation. I know that’s kind of out of style, but I’m talking about a personal criteria, not a universal or canonical one, and for me that criteria has mainly to do with interest. Long term interest is as good a proof as were likely to get of value, and it can’t really be faked. You can lie about it, but not to yourself. This is also implicit in Clark’s year of looking. A year wasn’t enough to exhaust the Poussins for him. They continued to generate and renew interest. Things that he’d seen and described one way, are seen and described again and again in the same and different ways. I wouldn’t say longevity is necessarily the last word in art (I was just thinking about Helio Oiticia’s work and how it seems to live off a contrary notion), but a certain honesty among people who spend time looking at art, if they really do care enough to spend the time, would, I believe, reveal a much broader consensus than is fashionable to imagine on what is worthy of the time, and if not consensus then at least a basis on which to talk about art in a meaningful, democratic, and enlivening way.
Along the same lines: Curator and writer Robert Storr was part of a panel discussion about the intersection of art and theory at the Frieze Art Fair just a week or two ago (also available as a podcast). If there was a transcript of his brief but stimulating portion of that lecture, I’d quote everything he said. (If there was a teddy bear of what he said, for that matter, I’d hug it till the stuffing came out.) There isn’t - neither - so here’s the link to the audio.
Can’t seem to finish footnoting this post: my heart blushed when Clark, in one of the first few lectures, turns a Picasso sideways (I’m taking his word for it, obviously I didn’t see him do it), validating somewhat a habit of my own that I guess must come out of an urge to plumb the pictures’ formal conundrums, but feels embarrassingly avid somehow. (And that’s not the full extent of it: I also sometimes reduce the images to greyscale. Sometimes I cut out the figures. It’s geeky.) The Picasso he flips holds up especially well, but one imagines a lot of cubist paintings would. Sideways, you can almost imagine a figure taking shape here. I’m surprised Picasso the showboat, the Picasso in Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso, didn’t do some stunt like that - making a painting that works equally well on its side.
Anyone interested in those lectures, or in Picasso, should know about this site. It’s a database of Picasso’s entire output. It used to be an even better resource. You could blow the pictures up. Now they’ve limited it to a thumbnail view and a kind of magnifying glass tool that allows you to see a zoomed-in detail view of so small an area that you can’t put it in its context. I’ve contacted them and this is how it’s going to be from now on, which is pretty disappointing. Still, it’s good if you want to trace Picasso’s work by year. Some of you want to do that from time to time, right?
Personal Author Constellation, 2009.
Quintessential blogging today. It’s a pretty standard assortment, isn’t it? No far-flung Herta Muellers, no sportive Dan Browns. It’s much like the Modern Library’s author constellation. But what can I say - these are the authors that I read and admired most this year. Much like last year, probably much like next year. Honourable mentions to Waugh and Capote, both of which authors I read for the first time this year and also got pretty into.
Luc Tuymans: Orchid and Der Diagnostische Blick IV.
Luc Tuymans interviews are cropping up (here, here, here) now that a mid-career retrospective of his work has started its 16 month trip around the US. Unfortunately, Peter Schjeldahl’s characteristically excellent review in the New Yorker isn’t available online. It’s worth the price of the magazine or a trip to the library if you like either him or Tuymans. Here are a couple of bits that I liked…
“…Tuymans discovers in the very humiliation of the medium a vitality as surprising as a rosebush on the moon. He does so with nothing-to-lose audacity, in terms of subject matter. If painting has nothing significant left to say, he seems to reason, it might as well say nothing about significant things.”
“”He told Artnet that in his initial hours of work, “until I get to the middle of the process - it’s horrific. It’s like I don’t know what I’m doing but I know how to do it, and it’s very strange.” Now, that - uncertain ends, confident means - is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know. It illuminates and justifies Tuymans’s eccentric work rule, with its distant redolence of Jackson Pollock’s odd decision to paint in the air above a canvas. The unities of form and feeling in Tuymans’s work may be shallow - as, under time pressure, he seizes upon whatever resolution of a picture first beckons. But the effect is thrillingly open-ended, as if the work were still in the act of coming to its point, dragooning the eyes and minds of viewers to that enterprise.”
Gold, Fingers.
Despite something throwaway about Tuymans paintings - each painted in a day and looking (just looking) haphazardly conceived, the imagery, drab and unfocused, culled from the multiplying stocks of the nearly unlooked-at - it’s surprising how many of his works are stealthily making their way into popular art iconography (the two at the top of this post are good examples; both pop up wherever there’s anything being said about the state of painting today). Maybe it’s something about the way his paintings slow imagery down to a pace where creation coincides with absorption that registers with people, or seems necessary. Maybe the air paranoia and distrust inscribed into them is recognizably our own. This is just the opposite of the big picture. Here, the excluded, the stuff outside the frame far outweighs the little we’re given. That imbalance against our favour accounts for at least some of the unease we feel looking at the paintings; (and, gluttons for punishment that we are, it also accounts for some of their magnetism: shrugging is the new enlightenment). In Tuymans, there is a paranoiac knot binding the opposed threads of utter triviality and looming significance, all appeals to reason interrupted by the dizzyingly banal, like jokes told at a crime scene.
The Secretary of State.
While I’m pooling links, here’s an audio interview with Tuymans by John Tusa of BBC 3 from, I think, a few years back. There are some other good interviews on that site, too.
Chris Ofili: The Raising of Lazarus.
I think he said it was blowfish fins in the sake flavouring it. Then he lit it on fire.
Critics Unanimous: New Hirst Paintings Stinking Up England
I almost feel sorry for Damien Hirst, what with the huge (and much-deserved) assault he’s taking in the British press for his new (honest-to-god hand-made) Bacon imitations. (Anyone who reads his interviews knows how much of a fan he is but treading onto Bacon’s turf so blatantly only reveals the gross disparity between the two.) Paragraph after delerious paragraph of shit-kicking; the critics are having a field day. Here’s a roundup of some of their comments…
Tom Lubbock: “They’re thoroughly derivative. Their handling is weak. They’re extremely boring. I’m not saying that he’s absolutely hopeless. But I’m not saying he’s any good either. There are many degrees of painting. There are many painters in evening classes much worse than Hirst. On the other hand, you’d find quite a few who were better, too. To try to be accurate: Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student. He is in his mid-forties.
“There are dozens of youngsters who turn up at our art schools each year, doing this turgid teen-angst stuff. And many of them are deluded enough, in their innocence, to think that their work is “deeply connected to the past.” Their teachers have to scold and embarrass them out of these bad habits.”
Rachel Campbell-Johnston: ”…a pale, silk-papered boudoir transforms into what feels more like a teenage boy’s bedroom. You can almost smell the brooding odours of existential angst.
“Here are all Hirst’s familiar obsessions: the skulls, the shark’s jaws, the ashtrays, the spots with the odd iguana or little O-level, “still life” lemon added to the mix. Hirst floats his images on the dark surface of the canvas, mapping out their spaces and relationships with a mesh of perspective lines.
“These works are utterly derivative of Bacon (give or take a dash of Giacometti), but they completely lack his painterly skill. And their metaphors are as ham-fisted as the application of pigment.”
Jonathan Jones: “It is shocking to see an artist so successful in arguing that art owes nothing to its past, sacrifice himself to that past. Hirst’s exhibition is a stupefying admission of defeat, a self-obliterating homage, that reveals the most successful artist of our time to be a tiny talent, with less to offer than even the most obscure Victorian painter in the Wallace Collection, let alone its Fragonards and Rembrandts. He reveals this because he chooses to meet them on their own terms, as a painter.”
Adrian Searle: ”Hirst’s paintings lack the kind of theatricality and grandeur that made Bacon succeed. At its worst, Hirst’s drawing just looks amateurish and adolescent. His brushwork lacks that oomph and panache that makes you believe in the painter’s lies. He can’t yet carry it off.
“Whatever his borrowings, Hirst did all this himself, unaided by his armies of assistants. He fills up his art with dead things: even the iguanas look stuffed. But these paintings are a memento mori for a reputation.”
Kafka sketch
Helio Oiticica
Artinfo: 90% of Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica’s work goes up in flames.
Oiticica was always a bit of a mythical figure in the first place, his work not too often seen. The majority of his career output disappearing will probably only cement the legend, not that that ameliorates the loss. He’ll become, as greg allen at greg.org puts it, “a digital ghost, haunting artists and art historians of the future.”
Among the works lost, apparently, are those he was perhaps most known for, the Bolides. I particularly like the Box Bolides, a set of genially ramshackle plywood sculptures that breathe fresh air into stuffy modernist geometry (one example above).
Helio Oiticica: some of the Spatial Reliefs
There is something equally warm and earthy about all of Oiticica’s work. His Spatial Reliefs are like plywood or construction paper origami; the Metaesquemas (examples below), make me imagine Matisse, Saul Bass, and Kazimir Malevich getting together for an afternoon tea party in some breezy hotel in the tropics, getting down on their hands and knees with some paints for a few hours, and coming out with a set of the most effervescent but elegant caprices you can imagine; his Parangolés were like wearable paintings, designed to be worn while dancing. Art never gets too far away from the bodies that make it and live with it with Oiticica.
some Metaesquemas
Oiticica’s pieces are mostly just boxes, paper, cloth, and color. They seem almost egoless - like growing a garden is egoless - relying more on revelations of form and color, the small experience, than on revelations of self. Which isn’t to say they are cold or impersonal - just the opposite. But they seem to say You too could make beautiful art like this everyday. They seem also to acknowledge certain limits - refreshingly. They are not inexhaustibly deep and - the fire unfortunately proves it - they weren’t made to last forever. Looking at them, you’re charmed by them but then you drop them and do something else. And that’s more than enough. For some people, art’s just part of life, like clothing, and as essential as eating. It’s not everything but it’s part of everything. Not all art makes such an affirmation of being forgettable.
Take a look at some more of Oiticica’s work here on the Tate’s site for the Oiticica retrospective it held a few years ago. An excellent overview of his output there.
